True Evil

CHAPTER 26

Chris pulled his pickup into the doctor's section of the St. Catherine's Hospital lot and parked. Before going inside, he ran a cable lock through the pitching machine and generator he carried for Ben's baseball practices. There had been a time in Natchez when he would not have had to take such measures, but that time was gone.

He made his rounds as conscientiously as he could, but the events of last night would not leave him. After saying good-bye to his last patient on the medicine floor, he took the stairs down to the first floor, heading for the ICU. There he met Michael Kaufman, Thora's obgyn, coming up. Two days ago, Chris had sent some of Thora's blood to Kaufman for analysis, to check for hormone imbalances that might be affecting her fertility.

"I'm glad I ran into you," Mike said, pausing on the stairs. "I found something strange in Thora's sample."

"Really? What?"

"A high level of progesterone."

"What?"

Kaufman nodded. "She's still trying to get pregnant, right?"

"Of course. What kind of level are we talking about? Contraceptive level?"

"More. Like morning-after pill."

Chris felt blood rising into his cheeks. Mike Kaufman had probably just committed an ethical breach, and he seemed to be realizing it himself. More than this, they had both become aware that Chris's wife was not being honest with him about a very important matter. Kaufman gave him an embarrassed nod, then continued up the stairs.

Chris walked slowly down toward the intensive care unit, hardly aware of his surroundings. The implications of Kaufman's revelation did not bear thinking about. Was it possible that Thora's whole seduction of him in the studio-her talk about trying to get pregnant-had been a charade? A cold-blooded act designed to cover up an affair, and God knew what else? When Chris saw the big doors of the ICU before him, they seemed to offer escape from the burgeoning hell in his mind.

The cooler air, the hum and beeping of machinery, and the soft voices of nurses gave him a momentary respite from himself. Here he had no choice but to concentrate on work. He had a resistant bilateral pneumonia in the unit that had failed to respond to two powerful antibiotics: a teenager from St. Stephen's. Last night, during evening rounds, Chris had ordered a vancomycin drip. If the boy's condition had not improved, he intended to punt the case up to Jackson, to an infectious-disease specialist he knew at UMC. When he looked toward the glass-walled cubicles, the first thing he saw was Tom Cage coming out of one of the rooms.

"Tom! I didn't know you had anybody in the unit."

"I don't," Dr. Cage replied, writing on a chart. "I was seeing the patient Don Allen consulted me about. I wanted to take a more detailed history than the one I found in his record."

"You learn anything interesting?"

"I'm not sure. Something is telling me that this guy might have generalized scleroderma, even though the lab tests don't show it. You often see almost no external signs in men, and this guy's blood pressure is truly malignant. Nothing will hold it in check."

"If it is internal scleroderma, what can you do about the hypertension?"

When the white-haired physician's eyes rose from the chart, Chris saw a look that Dr. Cage would never show a patient: helplessness mingled with frustration, rage, and resignation. Chris nodded sadly.

"Oh, I looked in on your pneumonia," Tom said. "His white count dropped significantly during the night."

"I'll be damned!" Chris said excitedly. "I was really starting to worry. The kid's only seventeen."

Tom sighed in commiseration. "I'm seeing more and more of these atypical pneumonias, particularly in young adults."

"Are you done with your rounds?"

"Yeah, I'm headed over to the clinic."

"I'm right behind you."

Chris walked into his patient's cubicle, but he didn't need to see the chart to notice the change. There was a brightness in the boy's eyes that had not been there for at least a week, and his flesh had already lost its deathlike pallor. When Chris listened to his chest with a stethoscope, he heard marked improvement, especially in the left lung. Chris was laughing at a joke the boy had made about nurses and bedpans when he caught sight of Shane Lansing writing in a chart at the nurses' counter outside. Lansing was looking at the chart as he wrote, but Chris had a strong feeling that the surgeon had been staring at him until the instant he looked up.

Mike Kaufman's words replayed in his mind: More…like morning-after pill.

Was Lansing thinking about a patient? Or was he thinking about Thora? Chris felt some relief at finding the surgeon in Natchez this early in the morning. Greenwood was over four hours away, and it was damned unlikely that Lansing would commute eight hours every day to screw Thora at the Alluvian Hotel. He would have to have left her at 4 a.m. to be here now. Still, Chris felt an irrational urge to walk out to the nurses' station and punch the surgeon's lights out. He told his patient he'd be back to check his progress after lunch, then updated the chart and walked out to the counter.

"Morning, Chris," said Lansing. "You think any more about that golf game?"

"I can't do it this afternoon." Chris searched Lansing's eyes for signs of fatigue. "But maybe I can get away tomorrow."

"Just give me a call. Or leave a message with my service."

"You can get away in the afternoons?"

"Yeah, it's my mornings that suck."

"That's why you make the big bucks."

Lansing didn't reply.

Chris watched the handsome surgeon scan another chart, then turned on his heel and walked out of the ICU.

As he trudged aimlessly down the hall, he almost walked into Jay Mercier, Natchez's sole hematologist. Like the other small-town specialists who found themselves treating everything from poison ivy to gout, Mercier served as a general-purpose oncologist, diagnosing almost every neoplasm in the county, then either treating them himself or acting as the contact person for specialized care in large metropolitan centers. He was one of the busiest doctors in town, yet Chris had always found him generous with his time, especially with consultations. Chris thought of pulling him aside and asking about the possibility of intentionally inducing cancer in human beings, but if he did, Mercier was certain to pepper him with questions about such an off-the-wall scenario.

"Morning, Chris," Mercier said with a smile. "How's that resistant pneumonia coming?"

"I think the vancomycin's going to do the trick."

"Good. That kid was looking shaky."

They had slowed enough to stop for a fuller conversation, but Chris forced himself to continue down the corridor. Once he rounded the corner, the exit was only a short walk away, but without quite knowing why, he stopped and leaned against the wall like a man taking a smoke break. Less than a minute later, he had his answer. When Shane Lansing rounded the corner, Chris stepped directly in front of him, blocking his path.

The surgeon looked surprised, but not afraid. "You reconsider that golf game?"

Chris looked hard into Lansing's eyes. "Are you fucking my wife, Shane?"

Lansing blinked, but he betrayed no deep emotion. "Hell, no. What are you talking about?"

Chris stared without speaking for a few moments. "I think you're lying."

Lansing's eyes narrowed. He started to speak, then he closed his mouth and tried to sidestep Chris.

Chris caught him by the arm and slammed him against the wall. "Don't walk away from me, you son of a bitch."

Lansing looked stunned, probably more by the directness of the confrontation than the physical attack. "You've lost your fucking mind, Shepard!"

"I'll bet you've been through a lot of these scenes, haven't you? A ladies' man like you? Well, guess what? This time you're not going to skate. If this were junior high school, I'd just whip your ass and let it go. But there's a kid at stake in this. And I know enough about you to know you don't really give a shit about Thora. Oh, you like fucking her, I'm sure. You like knowing she wants you. But the whole package doesn't interest you, does it?"

Lansing's eyes continued to betray nothing. But then, in the crackling silence, Chris saw a chink in his armor. It was smugness. Lansing could not conceal the superiority he felt-a secret superiority undoubtedly based on his intimate knowledge of Chris's wife-her body, her emotions, her intentions. And then a far more frightening scenario entered Chris's mind.

"Or does it?" he said. "It's the money. You always did love money. And Thora's got enough to make your mouth water, doesn't she?"

Lansing had abandoned all pretense at innocence-or so it seemed to Chris. He was saying something, but Chris didn't hear. His reptilian brain was reacting to the fist he felt rising from the surgeon's waist. Chris was no boxer, but he had wrestled for three years during high school. He threw himself backward with the momentum of Lansing's punch, then grabbed the extended wrist and hurled the surgeon bodily over him, smacking him to the floor.

Lansing's breath exploded from his lungs. Chris flipped him onto his stomach, shoved a knee into his back, and wrenched one arm behind his back. As Lansing yelped in pain, two nurses rounded the corner and stopped, gaping.

"Move on!" Chris shouted. "Leave!"

They scurried down the hall, but never took their eyes off the scene.

Chris put his mouth against Lansing's ear. "A friend of mine almost got killed last night. You may know that, or you may not. But remember this: you're not the only one involved here. There's Ben, your kids, your wife, Thora, and there's me. Most of those people can't defend themselves. But I can." He twisted Lansing's right arm until the surgeon screamed. "You do something to hurt Ben, and it'll be a year before you operate on anybody again. Do you hear me, Shane?"

Lansing grunted.

"I thought so. Now, if you're innocent, you just call the police and press charges against me. I'll be waiting at my office."

Chris heard a buzz of voices approaching from around the corner. He got to his feet and walked through the glass exit doors, then trotted to his pickup. As he drove out of the parking lot, he saw the hospital administrator standing outside the door, staring after him.

When Chris reached the clinic, he told Holly not to disturb him, then walked into his private office, buzzed the front desk, and asked Jane to get Dr. Peter Connolly of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on the telephone.

Pete Connolly had risen high in the world of oncology, but six years ago he had been a professor of hematology at the University Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. Then Sloan-Kettering had tapped him to head a new clinical research unit focusing on simultaneous organ and bone marrow transplantation. During his stint in Jackson, Connolly had started UMC on the road to gaining the designation of National Cancer Institute-of which only eight existed in the United States.

Jane buzzed Chris's phone, and he picked up the receiver. "Yes?"

"I'm on the phone with his nurse. Dr. Connolly is teaching some residents how to harvest bone marrow right now, but he'll try to get back with you before lunch."

"Thanks," Chris said, trying not to feel disappointed. You couldn't expect to call what was arguably the best cancer center in the nation and get one of their top researchers on the phone without a wait. "Tell her I appreciate the quick response."

"She can give you his voice mail if you want to leave a message."

"Okay, yeah."

"Hang on."

After a couple of clicks, he heard a digital voice say, "Please leave a message."

"Peter, this is Chris Shepard calling from Mississippi. I've got a pretty strange question, so I'm just going to lay it out and give you time to think about it. I want to know if it would be possible to purposefully induce cancer in a human being in such a way that a pathologist wouldn't detect that it had been done. I'm talking about blood cancers, and an eighteen-month time frame from diagnosis to death. I know this sounds crazy, but we dealt with some pretty crazy stuff back at UMC. I know you're busy, but I'd really appreciate it if you could get back to me when you get a chance."

Chris hung up and buzzed Jane. "When Connolly calls back, don't make him wait. Get me out of a room, no matter what I'm doing."

"I will."

"Unless I'm doing a pelvic."

"I know."

"Thanks." Chris took a deep breath, walled off the paranoid fears writhing in his brain, and walked out to face the day's patients.

Alex jerked erect in bed with her Glock in her hand and her eyes wide-open. Blue light streamed through a crack in the drapes on her right. It took her several seconds to remember where she was: a guest room in Chris Shepard's house. There was a desk against one wall, stacked with household bills and papers. It looked like the kind of desk housewives used to handle day-to-day business.

As Alex stared at the desk, her cell phone began to ring inside her purse. It had been ringing before, she realized. That was what had awakened her. What frightened her was that her private cell phone-the one she used to run her murder investigation-was lying silent on the bedside table. The phone in her purse was her official phone.

Oh, God…

Memories of last night's attack flashed through her mind. She had given her real name to the Natchez police: she'd had no choice. As she stared at the words UNKNOWN CALLER in the message window, she felt an impulse to answer the phone. But at the last moment she followed her standard procedure for the past month, which was to use her voice mail as a screening device. Her official phone could only mean bad news. The caller might be any number of field agents, or it might be her SAC in Charlotte, who was supposed to be on vacation in the Bahamas. After waiting a full minute, she dialed voice mail to find out who was looking for her.

"Agent Morse," began a familiar voice with a priggish Boston Brahmin accent, "this is Associate Deputy Director Mark Dodson in Washington."

Alex's chest tightened until breathing was difficult.

"I'm calling to inform you that we have dispatched a Bureau plane to bring you back to Washington for an interview with the Office of Professional Responsibility…"

Her blood pressure went into free fall.

"…jet is bound for Jackson, Mississippi. If you are anywhere other than Jackson, you should call me back immediately so that I can reroute the plane to wherever you are. Do not delay, Agent Morse. You will only make matters worse for yourself."

She heard a click, and Dodson was gone. When the voice-mail program offered her a chance to delete the message, she did so. She would not put herself through the hell of listening again to a mortal enemy in his moment of triumph. The Office of Professional Responsibility…

"Damn it!" she cried, climbing off the bed and pulling on yesterday's pants. If they were sending a jet for her, they must know everything. The extra sick leave she had taken, the fake reports she had filed, the classmate covering for her in Charlotte…they probably even knew about last night's attack in the carport by now. That was probably what had started the collapse of her whole house of cards. And all for nothing! Every white van checked by the police last night had been legally registered to a legitimate citizen.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she cursed.

Fighting back tears, Alex dialed the main switchboard of the Puzzle Palace in Washington, better known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Of course, she thought wryly, there's always the chance that they've sent the plane to carry me to Afghanistan, to negotiate the surrender of Osama bin Laden, or something equally as important. Possible-but unlikely. She asked the all-too-chipper switchboard operator to connect her to Associate Deputy Director Dodson's office. When she gave her name, she was immediately put through.

"Special Agent Morse?" said Dodson.

"Yes, sir."

"Where are you at this moment?"

"Natchez, Mississippi."

There was a longish pause. "I see they have an airport there that can take a Lear."

"I believe they do, sir."

"You will be at that airport in thirty minutes, packed and ready to go."

"Yes, sir. May I ask why, sir?"

"You may not."

"Yes, sir."

"That's all."

"Sir," Alex said, but Dodson had already hung up.

She looked around the empty guest room. Last night, with Chris Shepard in it, the bedroom had seemed a warm and human place. Now it was just another hollow shell. She walked into the bathroom to clean up as best she could.

When she closed the door and sat on the toilet, she found herself facing an eleven-by-sixteen-inch color portrait of Thora Shepard. Thora stared back at her with the cool indifference of a magazine model-stared right through her, really-with perfect blond hair framing the high cheekbones, sculpted nose, and sea-gray eyes that had ensnared Chris Shepard as surely as they had Red Simmons before him. Though Alex had never spoken a word to Thora, she had always felt that they were adversaries, like two agents on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, playing a distant game of cat and mouse. But now she realized that this was a ludicrous fantasy. The cool visage before her belonged to a woman who had already won whatever game she was playing, while Alex was about to be flown back to Washington for what amounted to professional execution.

Neville Byrd delicately adjusted the joystick in his lap, shifting the laser on the roof five millimeters to the right. Then he donned his goggles to check the line of the beam. Hello. This time he'd done it. The green beam terminated precisely at the center of the northeast corner window on the sixteenth floor of the AmSouth Bank Tower. From this moment forward-thanks to the laser and the fourth-generation optical scope sighted along the same track-every word spoken and every keystroke typed on the keyboard inside the office of Andrew Rusk would be recorded on the instruments racked in the flight case behind Neville Byrd.

Neville took a slug of Vault and leaned against the window of his hotel room, which was separated from the AmSouth tower by only a single city street. He was here at the behest of Noel D. Traver, a well-spoken man of about sixty with a horrible purple birthmark on his face. Dr. Traver had given Neville very simple instructions, then offered double his usual rates to accomplish them. This had made Neville Byrd a happy man. High-tech security work wasn't exactly a growth business in Mississippi.

For the last few years, Byrd had worked for divorce lawyers and private detectives, hacking into e-mail accounts and eavesdropping on the cell phones of people committing adultery. A long fall from the days when he worked for Netscape. Just ten years ago he had been part of the forefront of the battle against mighty Microsoft. Now CEO Jim Barksdale was a philanthropist, and Netscape was only a shadow of its former self-much like its former software engineer.

But this job was different.

Andy Rusk was one of the top five divorce lawyers in the city, and he had actually hired Neville on several occasions. In Neville's not-so-humble opinion, Rusk was just another aging Ole Miss frat boy with too much money and more ego than was good for him. Right now he was blabbing on the phone to some guy about a cross-country motorcycle trip he was organizing-on Harleys, of course; hawgs, man!-but rented ones. Rented Harleys. That pretty much said it all.

Neville took another slug of Vault and giggled. Unlike Andy Rusk, Dr. Traver seemed like a decent guy, and he was certainly a hell of a lot smarter than Rusk and his ilk. (Neville knew Traver was a veterinarian because he had looked him up on the Internet: A Breed Apart, Noel D. Traver, DVM Proprietor.) Dr. Traver knew about a lot more than animals, too. He had known exactly what kind of gear it would take to carry out the surveillance on Rusk's office, and he wouldn't have hired anyone who didn't own it.

Dr. Traver had not hired Neville blind, either. He'd asked him to drive down to the Byram exit on I-55 South for a face-to-face. Neville hadn't minded. He'd met people in lots worse places in the five years since he'd hung out his Digital Security shingle. Over a Frescata Club sandwich from Wendy's, Neville had assured Dr. Traver that he would be able to hack into Rusk's office network, no problem. Dr. Traver had been skeptical, and so far, his skepticism had proved justified. Whoever had beefed up Rusk's security had done all right. But the laser rig would nail him in the end. Not only would it pick up all of Rusk's conversations by measuring the vibration of the window glass, but it would also track which keys were depressed on Rusk's computer keyboard-and in which order-by measuring changes in the electromagnetic field of the office. The optical scope alone could make out about two-thirds of Rusk's keyboard and monitor, which meant that much of what was typed would also be recorded onto digital video.

The tough part of this job had been the installation. The Marriott Hotel was the only building with line-of-sight access to Rusk's sixteenth-floor window, and even the Marriott lacked windows facing the AmSouth tower. To solve this problem, Neville had built a custom rig at home-sort of a plastic doghouse for the laser and optical scope-then installed it on the roof of the Marriott. Then he'd checked into a room on the top floor and set up his wireless monitoring station.

So far its highest-value data transfer had been stunning views of Rusk's secretary's tits. The lawyer must have listed Russ Meyer tits as the prime qualification for the job, because his secretary had them in spades. She had killer calves, too. Neville wondered if maybe Dr. Traver was married to Rusk's secretary. But she was no more than thirty-and hot-while Dr. Traver was close to sixty and had that ugly mess of a birthmark on his face. Neville sipped his Vault and watched Rusk pick his nose as he jabbered on the phone.

"Maybe Traver's loaded," he said. "That must be it."

Neville waited for the secretary to reappear, confident that he would know everything there was to know about Andy Rusk, his secretary, and the old vet before the week was out. That was the main kick in this work, the feeling of omnipotence. A lot of game designers talked about the same thing, but that was only hackers' fantasy. This job wasn't animated chicks with comic-book bustlines; this was real life, real people. And if you were good, you got to peek into their private lives, their bedrooms, wherever you wanted. If you were really good, sometimes you got to peer inside their heads. That was the kick, man.